> Then life is not ok at all and there is approximately nothing you can do about it.

To return to parent's point, we want to say it applies only in autocratic countries, when we have similar pockets of despair as well.

Not everyone can just "fight the man" if they feel prayed upon or abused. Most here can probably solve critical issues with money or even move countries if/when shit hits the fan.

But lower social class people aren't in that mindset, and the power local authorities hold on their life is a lot heavier.

It certainly is. I’m not pretending that liberal democracies are perfect. Ensuring that the one with the least power or at the margin don’t become victims and remain free is a constant struggle but people are fighting it. It can be a dispiriting one when you go through times like the one of the USA are currently traversing

It would be a deep mistake however to fall from the traditional defence of illiberal countries and think that the imperfection of liberal democracies somehow make authoritarian countries as legitimate and acceptable. Oppression there is not an imperfection. It is the system working as designed.

I look at it from a different lens: the political system and what people's life look like isn't a predefined matrix.

To take a mild example, we don't look at federal countries and assume it affects citizen's life in a radical way that can be straight attributed to the federal nature of it. Germany biggest differences from France probably aren't because of that. Sure it has an impact, but not in an easily predictable way.

Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries. We've have democracies fully melt down and becoming literal hell on earth.

I don't intend to praise authoritarian regimes and don't see them as sustainable, but IMHO there is a lot more to a country than just that.

> Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries.

You are missing my points by orienting the discussion towards an abstract concept such as well managed.

Authoritarian countries mistreat part of their populations in a way which makes them morally abhorrent and that’s by design. You will hardly find people pointing it out and defending the marginalised in authoritarian countries because they themselves become the target of the state.

I’m not blind to the fact that most of the apologists I have met in my life who are always happy to point that it’s relative and what about the majority actually happy often want nothing more than to be the authoritarian power themselves. This seems particularly relevant in the current American context.

My general point would be that mistreating part of the population is a tool in a toolbox, and countries from all boards use it way more than we acknowledge.

We have democracies that either hang people on public places, pass eugenic laws, sentence gays to prison, or will engage in ethnic cleansing under official orders. Even in milder areas, prventing whole sections of the population from getting citizenship or limiting their reach (mass incarceration etc.) are well know levers that help a country be nice to its most vocal population while shutting down a whole section of the population. Those are readily available tools, whatever the political system.

And being well managed isn't abstract, you might be better off living in Monaco or Morocco, which are full fledge kingdoms, than a democracy like Nigeria for instance.

You might notice that I have carefully talked about liberal democracies in my previous comments. This is not a flourish. Democracy is not a panacea. The liberal part is essential.

In your opinion what would have happened if Google didn't have Chrome and just backed independent browsers to break the IE stronghold?

So they have to change the item name in their yearly check to Apple and Mozilla, and let them do the rest on their own ?

Google being allowed to pay Firefox or Apple whatever they want makes the exclusivity restriction pretty moot.

If Google pays Apple 3x more than OpenAI and Apple sets Google as default "because of market research, not because of the money", we're firmly in the status quo. So much as Google can modulate how much it pays Apple depending on how friendly they've been to Google in the last round.

> Apple testified that they would not have accepted any other searcch engine

"We only accept bribes from other monopolies"

This shit is just revisionist. The first time Apple and Google signed a contract to integrate Google into Safari, Google had ~32% of the search engine market, less than Yahoo! at the time, and they kept renewing that deal for over 20 years.

Any country trying to break Google will be fighting the US gov. It doesn't matter if other nations are better or worse in comparison, only the US has the power to rule over Google.

At best the EU could push penalties on Google, but nothing more.

It basically rules out structural remedies, so what's left is pinky promises of not misbehaving again. Whatever these promises are, that closes the case for me.

You make it sound like some AI company snapped 5% of global search traffic from Google across all devices. What's the actual number ?

I asked Grok and Gemini and they both said there have been reports that Google search has dropped below 90% for the first time, so it’s significant but it’s like a 1-2% drop.

I'd hazard a guess much higher than 5%

There's no point in discussing a meme, but carcinisation doesn't occur in that wide of a range, and of course the reverse phenomenon (decarcinisation) is also observed.

It's a fun image, but just as Facebook isn't becoming Apple, and Amazon won't become OpenAI, evolution phenomenons are more complex than "everything becomes X"

The whole notion of DRM and penalties if you circumvent it comes from the entertainment industry, and it's written into law/official treaties. This already affects everything from secure boot to HDMI standards.